by Man Martin
Limongello sat in Bone’s rolling office chair and put the heavy black case in his lap, unsnapping the clips and opening its mouth like a veterinarian peering into the throat of a giant but docile black toad. A series of tests followed, their gravity lightened by the doctor’s demeanor. Eyes closed, Bone identified a paperweight, pencil, and feather by touch. Then Bone identified them eyes open. Bone closed his eyes again, and Limongello touched his arm several times, asking how many fingers he felt. One, three, two. He gave Bone a random series of numbers to repeat. Next, Limongello had him sing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” playfully joining in for a rousing finale, “How I wonder what yoooo are!” He placed a pencil in plain sight, asking Bone to locate and to pick it up. The doctor put the pencil several places, never hiding it or preventing Bone from watching where he put it. After Bone successfully located it the sixth time, Limongello excused himself and went to the bathroom. When the doctor returned, he said, “There’s writing on the wall in there.” Bone explained it was a Chaucerian passage he’d been studying at one time and wanted to have before him as often as possible. Limongello nodded. “That’s right. You’re a linguist, I was forgetting.”
“Not really a linguist. A grammarian.”
“Right. Grammarian. The bathroom was where you had your first episode, wasn’t it?” Limongello looked toward the hall door that led to the bathroom as if expecting someone to come through. “Let’s go in there. Do you mind?” Bone followed the doctor to the bathroom. Limongello asked him to step into the tub, not a request Bone would ever have anticipated from a medical professional. Limongello stepped in after him, apologizing in case his shoes marked up the enamel. He peered at the faint words like an Egyptologist reading hieroglyphics. “What a great idea. This way you can study even in the bathroom.” He read aloud, “‘Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly.’ What’s ‘fetisly’?” Bone explained that orthography and vocabulary had changed since Middle English. “Ri-i-i-ight,” Limongello said. “Everybody treats doctors like we’re some sort of shamans, but I think you guys are the real shamans. You scholars.” Limongello put a hand on Bone’s shoulder and pinched Bone’s collar with the other, his eyes quizzical and humorous. “After all, what’s grammar but an attempt to find rules? Rules we can live by. What’s a definition but an attempt to find meaning?”
Turning to the writing again, Limongello licked his thumb and squeaked it on a letter. “Maybe you shouldn’t have used permanent ink. Which way were you facing when it happened?” Bone turned to the window. The fog had lifted, and the sun shone in a bright puddle by the stone steps. “You weren’t looking at the writing?” Limongello’s brow creased. “But you weren’t taking a bath, either?” Bone said he was not. “What were you doing?” Bone said he didn’t remember, and Limongello frowned. Bone asked what Limongello was hoping to find out. “Answers,” the doctor said with perfect seriousness. “But I don’t know which clues are relevant and which ones aren’t. It’s like being a detective. There’s something you’re not telling me, Bone.” Never having experienced the near-psychic ability of a gifted diagnostician focusing his complete unblinking attention, Bone started. “I wish I had an EEG in here,” the doctor mused. “I’d like to get a look at your readings right now. Can you step out of the tub by yourself?”
Bone could and did. Limongello followed, and they returned to the office.
“Apart from your grammar work, Bone, what’s on your mind?” Limongello said when they were seated. “What’re you concerned about?” Bone did not reply. “I want you to know, anything you tell me will be kept in strictest confidence.”
The pressure to tell pounded in Bone’s chest. A final, deep, wavering breath, and Bone confided his fears about Mary and Cash, about spying on her from the bathroom window. “My hands are shaking like a leaf,” Bone said with a half-laugh when he’d finished. “Do you think that’s one of my symptoms?”
Limongello held Bone’s hands and studied them. “Under the circumstances,” he said, “I’d say it’s just a normal reaction.”
“The irony is,” Bone said, “I’m not a saint, either. I’ve never done anything, but not for lack of trying.” In his comfort with the doctor, he told of his attempted and ill-advised liaison with Belinda of the Bounteous Boobies.
Limongello nodded, neither in judgment nor surprise. “Ah, yes. Septem Annis Scabiem,” he said. “Seven-Year Itch. It affects women as well as men. We find our perfect soulmate, and then, for some reason, that bores us. We look around for someone new.” He raised his hands in a vague gesture. “The human condition is dissatisfaction when everything is satisfactory.” Limongello regarded Bone. “But your syndrome, your immobility, is very interesting to me. I think it might help isolate the cause of certain other syndromes, syndromes that were once extremely rare but have become increasingly, alarmingly common. You might even say they threaten to become an epidemic. Now, some of the things I’m going to say may sound bizarre, even incredible, but you have to believe everything I’m telling you is the one hundred percent truth, however weird it seems. I’m going to tell you a story about a patient of mine. We’ll call him ‘Y.’”
“‘Y’?”
“Because if he was ‘U’ or ‘I,’ that would just be too confusing. Ha-ha. You stepped into that one, Bone. No, seriously. For obvious reasons, I can’t divulge the actual names of my patients. Suffice to say, Y’s problem is very real, and by no means untypical. Y was a successful car salesman, a decent person. Wife and family. Deacon at the Baptist Church. Whole nine yards. Got it?” Bone said he got it. “So anyway, one day Y just disappears. Vanishes. They put in a missing-person report, checked the morgue, the hospitals, the works. Nada. No one knows what happened. But then one day, what do you think?” Bone did not know what to think. “Someone recognizes him! He’s living in a different town! He has a different name, a new job, he’s even got himself a girlfriend. So anyway, they tried reuniting him with his family. Y tried. He moved back with his wife. He slept with her. Helped with the dishes. Called her ‘Sugar-Boo.’ But it didn’t come back; he never remembered his old life. His wife says he was like a whole ’nother person after he returned. It’s like he never really came back at all. The fact is, Y no longer exists. His body is still there, nothing wrong with the body, only now there’s a whole ’nother person inside it. As far as Y himself is concerned, or the man who used to be Y, there’s no such person as Y. To this day, Y has not come back, and the man who used to be Y will swear on a stack of Bibles he doesn’t know him.”
“Jesus,” Bone said.
“‘Jesus’ is right,” Limongello said solemnly. “Neurologists don’t like to talk about the mind these days, but I’ll tell you what I think. I think Y’s mind completely dislodged from the reticular formation in his brain. I’m not talking about mental illness here. I mean whatever glue or adhesive holds the mind inside the physical brain broke or came loose, and his mind or soul or whatever you call it—his self—dislodged. I know all this sounds incredible, but I’m convinced that’s what happened. Wherever Y’s self is, I suppose it’s still somewhere in his skull, if it still exists, it’s no longer joined to his physical brain. And Y’s not the only one. There are thousands of people just like Y whose selves dislodge, dislodge and float away from inside their own brains. And disappear forever. And there’s more of them every day.”
“God, is that’s what’s happening to me?”
“I’ve been studying Y’s case, and it turns out his disappearance maybe wasn’t quite as sudden as it looks. If you knew what to look for, there were signs. Symptoms. Of course, Y himself can’t tell us what happened before he dislodged, but I’ve interviewed his wife, and she said some very intriguing things, and very suggestive. For example, one time—this was about a month before he disappeared—Y told his wife he didn’t feel like getting out of bed. Not sick or anything, just didn’t feel like getting out of bed. So his wife figures, what the hey, calls in sick for him, and Y takes an unscheduled holiday, spending the day in bed, his wife bringing hi
m meals and everything. Next day he goes back to work and never asks to stay in bed again. Only one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ve got a hunch,” Limongello said. “It’s just a hunch, but it’s a real strong one, and right now I don’t have anything else to go on. We can’t know for sure because the only person who could tell us is Y, and Y doesn’t exist anymore. But my hunch is Y didn’t stay in bed because he didn’t feel like getting out but because he couldn’t get out. Sound familiar?”
“Jesus, oh, Jesus.”
“That’s why your case is so interesting to me, Bone. That’s why this is so important. I believe you may be showing the same early symptoms as Y. If I can isolate those symptoms and find a treatment, I might prevent your self from dislodging from your brain. Even more, I might be able to save any number of Ys down the road. You see why this is so important?”
“Of course.”
“I didn’t want to alarm you, but I need you to see why I’m devoting so much time to your case and why it’s imperative you give me as much cooperation as you can. I know my methods are unorthodox, and I don’t act like a regular doctor.” Limongello made air quotes around the word “doctor” as if being a neurologist were make-believe. “But I need you to trust that I’ll do everything in my power to help you, and I need you to do what I ask even if some of it seems strange.” He reached into his case and pulled out a white envelope. “Your eyes only.” He shook the envelope twice, and Bone accepted it.
It was an envelope, labeled in green block letters “bone king: personal and confidential.” It contained a typed survey, and at the bottom of the second page Limongello had written, again in green ink, “Use additional pages if needed.” Two attempts at “necessary” had been X’d out before Limongello had settled on “needed.” Limongello might be a brilliant neurologist, but a spelling champ he was not.
“Anything, Doctor, whatever you need.”
“He really is a great guy,” Bone told Mary about Limongello when she came home. “He helped me put together the bookcase.”
“Not all that great,” Mary said skeptically. “What are all these leftover pieces?”
“Nothing,” Bone said. “They’re just extra. Dr. Limongello says there’s always leftover pieces.”
Mary was, if anything, even less impressed with the double-doc’s diagnosis than with his bookshelf-building ability. “Your self is becoming dislodged? Are you sure that’s what he said?” Her brow wrinkled. “I never heard of a diagnosis like that. Is that even a thing? Maybe you should see another specialist.”
Mary’s criticism, however, only served to make Bone defensive about the double-doc who had dignified his strange condition with a fittingly strange diagnosis.
G, g
Not, as we would expect, from the Semitic gimel (G), “throwing stick,” but from the Greek zeta (I), resembling uppercase I and pronounced /z/. Latin having no /z/ sound, the Romans pronounced it /s/, a sound already supplied by S itself. If we are to believe Plutarch’s account, it was a former slave turned grammarian, Spurius Carvilius Ruga, who arbitrarily assigned zeta the hard /g/ of good and gold. (Parenthetically, Spurius means “false” or “illegitimate” in Latin. Plutarch also credits Ruga with being the first Roman ever to divorce.) Ruga lopped the short horizontal stems from zeta’s western side, making a bracket ([ ), which in time bowed into a semicircle, perhaps under kindred C’s gravitational pull. A vestige of zeta’s original flat base remains as a fishhook in the bottom half of uppercase G. In serif fonts, lowercase G is a pair of pince-nez orbs joined by a half-loop (g). In sans-serif fonts, it faces left and gapes slack-jawed (g).
God: By definition indefinable, the most that can be said is what God is not. For example, God is not a chipped white mug of Red Zinger tea, nor a vagrant standing by Waffle House at the access road to Interstate 285 with “Will work 4 food” lettered on cardboard with a Magic Marker. Unless God actually is those things, in which case we’re back where we started. Derived from the Proto Indo-European gheu, “to invoke, or call upon.” Hence, God is “the one prayed to.”
Questionnaire for Bone King
Prepared by Arthur Limongello, MD, MD
Personal and Confidential
Please answer as thoroughly and honestly as possible.
Your best friend gets a cash bonus and a big promotion. How would you feel?
1. b. How would you secretly feel?
The same friend tells you that his boss threatened to fire him, and also his girlfriend is breaking up with him. How would you feel?
2. b. How would you secretly feel?
3. Do you find yourself making “games” out of ordinary tasks or pretending to “play a part” in order to make them endurable?
4. Do you ever have inappropriate emotional reactions? For example, do you ever feel happy when you ought to be sad, or vice versa?
5. Do you ever feel your life is not your own, or isn’t “real” somehow? Explain.
6. Do you ever get the feeling other people are “missing something”? Like they’re hollow or not really real, they’re like robots, only made out of meat? It’s like their feelings aren’t really real feelings, not like your feelings? Explain.
7. Did you ever wake up from a nightmare where someone you’re close to, like your wife, wasn’t who they seemed to be, but, along with just about everyone you knew, was in a complicated conspiracy to trick you out of something and maybe even kill you? Explain.
Lately when Bone called, his editor always seemed to be in a meeting, but today Grisamore picked up. “Bone.” Less a greeting than flat identification.
To Bone’s question, “How are you?,” Grisamore said he was fine, and Bone, unasked, said with a chuckle that he was fine as well. “I was wondering if you got those sample chapters.” Grisamore had, and Bone sipped his coffee, awaiting praise or criticism. Neither came. Bone had the sudden conviction that Grisamore was playing Sudoku. Was it his imagination, or could he hear the scritch of graphite on newsprint shaping a 2’s half-loop and sidestroke? “What did you think?”
“The truth is, I haven’t gotten around to it.” Hadn’t gotten around to it?
“Well, ha-ha-ha, that’s okay.” (Stop laughing! Bone pressed a mental foot to the floorboard, but it seemed the brake lines had been cut.) “It’s not quite the direction we discussed, but I think you’ll like it.” A pause, verifying the top right corner could be 9 and only 9. “You’ll get the finished manuscript soon. Two weeks at most.”
“It’s not important,” Grisamore reassured him.
Bone hung up, swirling his coffee, mulling dark thoughts. Better get to work if he wanted to finish in two weeks. On a yellow legal pad, he blocked out a determined grid: this many pages by noon, a light lunch, annotate ’til three, then proofread until time to go to Fulsome, a little more proofreading before turning in, so his text would be fresh in his head, ready to hit those pages first thing in the morning.
And no goofing off, either.
But thinking about work kept him from doing any. His anxieties shuffled through their playlist: Mary, Gordon, Cash, Grisamore. But Grisamore said the book was fine. Even though he hadn’t read it—why hadn’t he read it? Had he said it was fine? Or that he, Grisamore, was fine? Bone couldn’t recall.
He brewed a fresh pot of coffee, this time too strong, and drank a mug, fortified with plenty of sugar. Now to focus on the manuscript.
He snorted awake, stiff-necked from lying on the couch. Lunchtime. He imagined an improbable gourmet salad such as bohemian intellectuals concoct from their icebox’s random remnants: a handful of leftover blueberries here, a smattering of bleu cheese crumbles there, but all he found of bleu cheese and blueberries was their absence, along with a corresponding lack of field greens and raw asparagus tips that had graced the salad plate of his fantasy. In lieu of these, Bone ate a bag of pita chips.
He continued in a dither until he went to class, and there, thirsting for home and some good solid research, he was cornere
d by Belinda.
“Professor King? I wanted to talk to you about my paper?” An essay with a sad scarlet C trembled in her hand. Bone put on his avuncular voice, sympathetic but uncompromising. He explained that while her content was acceptable, her errors were legion: “they’re,” for example, is customarily a contraction of “they are,” not the possessive form of “they,” as she’d employed it in some places, nor the antonym of “here,” as she had elsewhere; that her apostrophe use could only be described as whimsical; and that AYK and BKA were acronyms best reserved for text messages and left out of formal papers altogether.
Her chin quavered, and a shining tear threatened to moisten an eyelash, but she was made of tougher stuff. “I was thinking that maybe there is no such thing as correct grammar?” she ventured, a timid Edmund Hillary touching a tiptoe to the Himalayas.
“What?”
“That maybe what you call correct grammar is only a dialect?” She didn’t look from her paper. “That maybe I have my own dialect? And it has a worthwhile grammar, too?”
“Where’d you read this?” But Bone knew exactly where she’d read it. It was a pure pile of E. Knolton, served up brown and steaming, word for word, save for the naive Belindaesque substitution of “worthwhile” for “worthy.” Some rash and reckless librarian must have left a heretical journal out in the open. “Listen, Belinda,” Bone said. He didn’t place a reassuring hand on her shoulder, but his tone suggested he might do so at any moment. “If you’re going to succeed in life, if you’re going to live up to the wonderful potential inside you, you have to master Standard American English. You understand, don’t you?”
Here Belinda inserted a meek “Yes, sir.”
“People who speak these other ‘dialects’ get judged. Others assume they’re ignorant and uneducated and don’t give them a fair hearing. It isn’t fair, but that’s the way it is.”
